


Absolution

by Bunney



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-22 06:37:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/910077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bunney/pseuds/Bunney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Torture; sexuality; reference to canon events in <i>Deathly Hallows</i></p>
    </blockquote>





	Absolution

**Author's Note:**

> Torture; sexuality; reference to canon events in _Deathly Hallows_

  
**Title:** Absolution  
 **Pairing:** Draco Malfoy/Hermione Granger  
 **Rating:** NC-17  
 **Word Count:** 2153  
 **Notes:** Torture; sexuality; reference to canon events in _Deathly Hallows_

 

 

He asked her to wear an executioner's hood, handing her the black silk garment with trembling and hopeful hands. Why, she asked, taking it between her fingers, holding it away from her body as her lip curled in scorn.

So that when I see you, I will know you only as my tormentor, he'd answered plainly.

With an anxious soul, he awaited her answer, knowing logically that she would acquiesce because she needed this as much as he, this release from the prison of her memories, but fearing that she would cast his indenture back in his face, damning him to a lifetime of crushing guilt. That he would not be able to bear; he would not be able to live with the knowledge of all he had done.

The ebb and flow of Knockturn Alley swirled around them as they walked silently together, pressing in on them from all sides, seeking their secrets and prying into their thoughts. He was more adept at Occlumency than she, but he could feel the rigid wall of her mental shielding shivering between them. She wasn't keeping him out so much as keeping out the people around them, but he couldn't read her deepest thoughts, only the ones on the surface. The ones that bespoke of fear and revulsion and hatred.

And temptation.

He had caught her on the line of her own insatiable curiosity, baited with the worm of revenge.

You'll do it? he asked. I'll make it worth your while. I can give you anything you desire. Ask and it shall be yours.

She shook her head, bemused by his intensity, his willingness to give himself to her, no questions asked, no safe word required. Why? she asked. Why would you agree to such vile things?

He smiled, sad and small, but strangely dignified, which seemed even more of an oddity.

Because I need it, he said. I need absolution. I need cleansing. I need purification.

She understood then, because she craved the same thing, albeit for differing, but no less imperative, reasons. She had her demons, her shame, deeds gone dreadfully wrong that haunted her days and nights. He could read it in her eyes, in her breath, in the timpani of her heart. They were surrounded by a sea of people but stood together on the surface of a very lonely ocean. He alone could know her isolation.

Her fingers clutched around the executioner's hood as a stray wisp of air caught a single curl and lashed it against her cheek. She nodded, once, twice, then vanished on a spin of her heel.

He breathed out and out, relief sagging his body nearly to the ground.

The light shone at the end of the tunnel, pardon for his crimes at a finger's distance. She would come to him. She would take his sins into her own body and together they would find freedom.

 

 

 

 

The executioner's hood was a sinuous, shadowy drape against her skin, turned golden in the sparking torchlight. She was nude, save for the hood, a rosy flush across her breasts the only indication of her discomfiture. Her nipples were puckered and erect, a single drop of sweat beading between her breasts, despite the room's chill. Her wand was held loosely in one hand, the other pressed against her stomach, over her navel where a tiny red jewel nestled. He stared at it, letting its sparkle hypnotize him.

He was equally stripped of clothing and artifice, his body coated with a sheen of perspiration. At the juncture of his trembling thighs, his cock was a rigid, throbbing _thing_ , pulsing in time with his racing heart. It should have been a moment of crushing humiliation; facing his enemy as bare as a newborn babe, his most vulnerable flesh should have shriveled and retreated and curled back into his body. But her cold regard energized him; the sight of her own arousal ( _for his pain, his degradation_ ) enticed him erect.

With a hiss of breath, she raised her arm and slashed at him with the tip of her wand. An acidic flash erupted from it, curling sharply in the air, before tracing like gunfire across his abdomen. Pain, sharp and white-hot, sizzled along his nerve endings, prickling the fine layer of epidermis, sparking like needles into his bones. He curved outward, straining against the invisible shackles that held him suspended in mid-air. A scream, guttural and gut-deep, echoed through the room. Before he could draw breath for another, she sent another slash of primal magic at him, which landed with surgical precision along the tops of his thighs and coiled around his scrotum. His testicles drew tight against his body as pain exploded in his gut. His cock jerked and even that small movement sent ripples of _pleasurepain_ skittering up and down his bowed spine.

She denied him a chance to recover; another blow landed across his nipples, and another directly on the tip of his cock. That last was all it took; with a helpless scream, he came harder than he'd ever come before, even in those early days when he'd discovered the secret shame of self-pleasure behind the curtains of his schoolboy bed. Semen splattered his chest and stomach and even his chin. He wanted to take himself in hand, continue to draw forth every drop he could spare, but his hands remained bound and stretched above his head. He should have felt shame but all he could do was whisper, _thank you thank you thank you_.

His eyes fluttered shut, but the feel of her palm cutting sharply against his cheek brought his head up and he stared at her dark, angry eyes peering from behind the hood. How dare you, she shrieked, how dare you find pleasure in this? Another slap flung his head to the side, pink scratches blooming through the pale gold stubble on his cheek.

You wanted this, she hissed. You wanted to pay for your crimes, didn't you?

Yes, he whispered. Yes oh yes oh yes.

She stepped closer, until the tips of her breasts, so full, so beautiful, pressed into his stomach. She looked up at him, torchlight glittering in her eyes, obscuring her humanity. She was his mercy, his executioner.

Her inhumanity thrilled him.

Pressing her wand into the hollow of his throat, she whispered something that sounded Latin, Greek, some dead language that he'd never bothered to learn. It blossomed so quickly, that he mistook it for something pleasurable. Then, his raw nerve endings shrieked soundlessly, contorting his body in agony and bringing his cock roaring back to life.

He put his head back and screamed at the gilded ceiling.

 

 

 

 

She left him there, suspended, although she'd relaxed the spell so that it didn't feel quite like his arms were being ripped from his body. Before leaving, she took his sight with a twist of her wand, narrowing his field of vision until all he could see was the executioner's hood, then that too was gone. All was black.

Hours passed and he tried to sleep, but the anticipation of her return, in an hour, a day, an eternity from the moment before, kept him on tenterhooks. He sought out her thoughts, searching the room with his mind, then the manor house around it, but there was nothing. He shuddered in horror, imagining for a shining, terrible moment, that she'd left him there, caught forever in the amber of guilt and clemency.

But, then he felt the firewall of her occlumenced mind shiver. She was better than he had previously thought. She had been there all along. Watching. Hating. Planning.

He relaxed, he slept, content in the knowledge that his punishment had only just begun.

 

 

 

 

Do you remember...? she asked. This prefaced everything. Do you remember...?

_Stomping on Harry's face, breaking his nose? Choking him on his own blood?_

Do you remember...?

_Using the Imperius Curse on Katie Bell, Madame Rosmerta, countless others?_

Do you remember...?

_Watching whilst I was tortured? Learning the art of pain at the feet of your Auntie Bella?_

Do you remember?

He did.

He remembered all of it and more and as wandfire traced his veins and filled his arteries with ice, he screamed out his memories, one by one by one. Potter, Katie Bell, Madame Rosmerta, Weasley, Granger...

Hermione Granger.

She lifted the hex as he bellowed her name, thick on his tongue and coated in spittle and blood. Granger Granger Granger, he cried. I didn't know, he wept. I didn't _know_.

Her fury was a raw, living thing and he howled until his voice cracked and failed utterly. He shut his eyes tightly, only to have her peel back his eyelids with a flick of her wand, forcing him to watch his shame at her hands. Her wand was a blur and in the very depths of his shattering mind, he could appreciate the skill with which she wielded it. Any notion of Mudbloods and inferior magic and unworthy bloodlines trickled away, leaving him with nothing but a fervent desire to worship her as his most terrible goddess. The divine being that held his life, his sanity, his redemption, in her perfect hands.

His prick was hard again, and she used her wand to sketch razor's edge designs on it. Not a drop of blood spilled, but the pale perfection of his body bore the marks of her torture nonetheless. Brilliant slashes of crimson, welts and weals, intricate lacerations, raised on his skin, layering atop bruises and fading marks of her never-waning rage. He dripped with sweat, he couldn't escape the stench of his own body; it was heady and ripe, reminiscent of the Quidditch locker rooms and for a moment, he let himself escape into a memory that wasn't always painful and occasionally quite pleasant. One hand curled into a fist and he imagined the cold Snitch encased in his palm, its silvery wings beating weakly against his fingers.

She chased that memory away with a poker of dark fire, stabbing deep into his anus, and all thoughts of Snitches and Quidditch and bright, November mornings disappeared in a rictus of anguish.

You'll never win, she whispered, reading his bleeding thoughts as easily as a first-year's textbook. Harry catches the Snitch and you'll never, ever have anything that belongs to him.

 

 

 

 

She was screaming. From behind the executioner's hood, her voice was sharp, but the words needed no clarification.

Names.

One after another after another she screamed. The names of the dead were an endless litany from her lips and lungs of people he remembered in his nightmares.

Oh how many times had he told himself... _they're nobody. They're blood traitors, Mudbloods, poor and worthless, no better than the filthiest Muggle. No one cares, no one will miss them, no one will remember._

But the names made a lie of that. They were schoolmates, teachers, family, friends. The blood on his hands was still sticky-hot, years after he had doomed them to death. Because of him, because of his cowardice and self-interest, he had crossed the path of damnation littered with the bones of his unwitting victims.

For each name, she traced his body with laser-sharp flame from the tip of her wand. She weaved it in a pattern of destruction, cutting the names of the dead into his skin. Blood splattered the carpet, the walls, her heaving breasts. Drunk on the power she wielded over him, she smeared his blood over her nipples, drew crimson designs on her stomach. She fell back into the chair she had position before him and used his blood to bring herself to orgasm.

Draco knew that she would forever own his soul and he _yearned_ for her.

 

 

 

 

She gave him back his sight, she healed his scars ( _all but the ones on his penis; those he begged her to leave be_ ), and she tenderly lifted a glass of cold water to his lips so that he could soothe his scream-hoarsened voice. Then, with all the gentleness of a mother for her child, or a woman for her lover, she loosened his bindings and helped him to his bed.

Twenty-four hours, Draco, she said. You are strong. You're brave. You lasted longer than I imagined you would.

It wasn't long enough, he said, weary to his very bones, yet alive, _alive_ , at last. He took her hand, fearful of her rejection. For your forgiveness, I would submit to your punishment for the rest of my life.

There was no rejection and his heart sang as she pulled away the executioner's hood, revealing her exhausted, tearstained, her oh so beautiful face. She tossed it away, a whispered spell banishing it forever. She slipped into his bed and curled her body around his, her hand cupping his chin. Her kiss was featherlight on his lips and he returned it with reverence.

I forgive you, Draco, she whispered. You are _free_.

~Fin~


End file.
